Sipping chai with an elderly friend in Azamgarh one evening, we talked of various issues confronting the Muslims. Seeing women in burqa across the street, my elderly friend remarked, with utmost disgust, that be-purdagi had increased manifold. What he meant was that Muslim women were hardly observing purdah. This was astonishing for me, to say the least. For, in the last two months that I had been staying in Azamgarh, I had seen very few women without the burqa. When I expressed my surprise on his statement, he forcefully remarked: ‘But there are so many of them (women) on the street!’